Library Resources and Services for ITSF 5199, Theories of the Policy Process in a Global Context

This research guide is intended as a representative sampling of library resources and services of particular relevance for students in Dr. Nancy Green Saraisky’s Spring 2017 course ITSF 5199, Theories of the Policy Process in a Global Context. The resources, primarily electronic and accessible on and off campus, have been selected as ones supporting the aims of the course, including providing “an overview of education policy making by looking at how actors, interests and institutions interact to facilitate and constrain the policy making process.” The guide also includes a section describing research consultation and assistance services and options for document retrieval and delivery available to all members of the Teachers College community.

All students, faculty, and researchers also have access to a number of important library services and publications provided to support and facilitate research and study in their particular programs and disciplines.

Online Catalogs

EDUCAT – The most definitive record of the holdings of the Gottesman Libraries at Teachers College, including books, e-books, journals, e-journals, dissertations, media, and other specialized collections of all kinds.

CLIO – The union catalog of Columbia University Libraries (exclusive of the libraries of Teachers College, the Columbia Law School, and Jewish Theological Seminary), providing the most definitive record of individual libraries’ holdings of books, e-books, journals, e-journals, dissertations, media, and other specialized collections of all kinds.

WorldCat – The union catalog of the contents of over 10,000 libraries worldwide, providing the means to do exhaustive searching by author, title, subject, and numerous other criteria and to find locations for specific items in libraries nearby and elsewhere. WorldCat is readily accessible without restriction at http://www.worldcat.org/.

Library of Congress Subject Headings are the official subject terms prescribed by the Library of Congress for the cataloging of books and are in use in essentially all academic libraries. To find works pertaining to the policy process, global education policy, and related topics, it may be useful to use some of the subject terms listed below when searching the online catalogs of libraries at Teachers College, Columbia University, and other institutions.

Academic Search Premier – A multidisciplinary database providing full text for more than 4,600 journals, including nearly 3,900 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals. See also Academic Search Complete, a scholarly, multidisciplinary full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1887.

EconLit – The American Economic Association’s database of the literature in economics, containing citations, abstracts, and full text for economic research dating back to 1969. Covers journal articles, books, collective volume articles, dissertations, and working papers, among other types of publications.

ERIC – Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education to provide extensive access to educational-related periodical literature, ERIC (which stands for Educational Resources Information Center) provides coverage of conferences, meetings, government documents, theses, dissertations, reports, audiovisual media, bibliographies, directories, books, and monographs. In addition to this version, made available via the ProQuest platform, also accessible via the U.S. government ERIC site and through Ebsco ERIC.

Education Full Text – Provides comprehensive coverage of an international range of English-language periodicals, monographs, and yearbooks. Indexing coverage begins June 1983; abstracts are included beginning spring 1994; full text of some journals is available beginning in January 1996.

Education Index Retro – Provides cover-to-cover indexing for an international range of English-language periodicals and yearbooks; coverage from 1929 through mid-1983.

Education Research Complete – Provides indexing and abstracts for more than 2,100 journals, as well as full text for more than 1,200 journals, and includes full text for nearly 500 books and monographs.

FRANCIS – An international, multilingual, multidisciplinary database providing extensive coverage of the social sciences and humanities.

International Bibliography of the Social Sciences – A valuable online resource for social science and interdisciplinary research, IBSS includes over two million bibliographic references to journal articles and to books, reviews and selected chapters dating back to 1951, providing broad coverage of international material and incorporating over 100 languages and countries.

International Political Science Abstracts – Indexes and abstracts articles in the field of political science (including the sub-fields of public administration, political theory, and international relations) published in journals and yearbooks published worldwide.

PAIS Index – Contains citations to journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, “gray literature,” research reports, conference reports, publications of international agencies, and Internet resources pertaining to public affairs and public policy issues; coverage from 1915 to present.

Professional Development Collection – Designed for professional educators, this database provides a highly specialized collection of nearly 520 high-quality education journals, including more than 350 peer-reviewed titles. The database also contains more than 200 educational reports.

ProQuest – Provides broad multidisciplinary coverage of scholarly journals, newspapers, dissertations, and other types of publications; for international coverage and access to full texts of dissertations only, search Digital Dissertations, a subset of ProQuest.

Social Sciences Full Text – Provides coverage of English-language journals across social science disciplines, with indexing from 1983, abstracting from 1984, and select access to full text from 1984 to the present.

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts – Provides abstracts and indexing of the international literature of political science and international relations, along with complementary fields, including international law and public administration/policy. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,500+ serials publications and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and working papers.

Google Scholar – Provides the means to search for scholarly research across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other web sites.

Quicksearch (via Columbia University Libraries) – To search the catalog, multiple periodical indexes, and other web resources simultaneously within a variety of subjects and disciplinary subcategories.

CIAO (Columbia International Affairs Online) – “Publishes a wide range of scholarship from 1991 onward that includes working papers from university research institutes, occasional papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, proceedings from conferences, books, journals and policy briefs. CIAO is also widely-recognized source for teaching materials including original case studies written by leading international affairs experts, course packs of background readings for history and political science classes, and special features like the analysis of a bin Laden recruitment tape with video.”

Ebrary – Online books across a range of subject areas; searchable, under All Subjects, by Fine Arts; History (General) and History of Europe; Language and Literature; Music and Books on Music; Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, etc., and various sub-topics, and by author, title, and other criteria.

JSTOR – An online archive of over 1,200 leading scholarly journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. Journals are always included from volume 1, issue 1 and include previous and related titles. The most recently published issues (the past 3-5 years) are generally not available through JSTOR, though they usually are through other e-sources.

Oxford Scholarship Online – Provides the full text of classic and newly published Oxford University Press books in economics and finance, law, political science, and other disciplines.

RAND Published Research – Contains more than 20,000 RAND Corporation publications, most of which are available as free eBook downloads, dating back to 1946.

SAGE Knowledge – “A database of ebooks and reference books published by SAGE covering the social sciences and education, including such areas as African American Studies, Aged & Gerontology, Anthropology, Communication and Media Studies, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Economics, Education, Gender & Sexuality Studies, History, Politics, Psychology, Social Issues, Social Work & Social Policy, and Sociology.”

International Handbook of Comparative Education – This 2009 compendium “brings together leading scholars from around the world, who provide authoritative studies of the old and new epistemic motifs and theoretical strands that have characterized the interdisciplinary field of comparative and international education in the last 50 years” and “analyses the shifting agendas of scholarly research, the different intellectual and ideological perspectives and the changing methodological approaches used to examine and interpret education and pedagogy across different political formations, societies and culture.”

Handbook of Education Politics and Policy – The Second (2015) edition of this work comprises 18 chapters divided into two major sections: Part I, “The Institutional Context of Educational Politics,” and Part II, “Interest Groups, Activists, Entrepreneurs, and Educational Reform.”

The Handbook of Global Education Policy – This 2016 collection “offers a comprehensive overview of the ways in which domestic education policy is framed and influenced by global institutions and actors” and “surveys current debates about the role of education in a global polity, highlights key transnational policy actors, accessibly introduces research methodologies, and outlines global agendas for education reform.”

Handbook of the Economics of Education – Now in four volumes (2006-2011) and growing, this handbook brings together economic research that aims explicitly to understand better how education is acquired, how it affects economic and social outcomes of interest, and how it can inform public policy. Volume 4 includes chapters on economic aspects of migration and education; inequality, human capital formation, and the process of development; educational vouchers in international contexts; the political economy of education funding; and other topics.

International Handbook of Educational Policy – This 2005 handbook “presents contemporary and emergent trends in educational policy research, in over fifty chapters written by nearly ninety leading researchers from a number of countries. It is organized into five broad sections which capture many of the current dominant educational policy foci and at the same time situate current understandings historically, in terms of both how they are conceptualized and in terms of past policy practice.”

Annual Reviews – Reviews of topics in social sciences and other disciplines published as annual journals; see series for Economics, Political Science, and others.

Review of Educational Research – A publication of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the RER publishes quarterly critical, integrative reviews of research literature bearing on education, including conceptualizations, interpretations, and syntheses of scholarly work.

Review of Research in Education– A publication of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the RRE provides an annual overview and descriptive analysis of selected topics of relevant research literature through critical and synthesizing essays.

Web of Science– Comprising the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Science Citation Index Expanded, this database supports searching by topic, author, or publication name, and is also a major means for doing cited reference searching, to find articles that cite a person’s work.

PocketKnowledge – The social archive of Teachers College, including unpublished manuscripts and archives from the library’s collections, documents from other departments and administrative offices College-wide, and the work of TC students, faculty, and researchers.

You will find a complete alphabetical listing of Columbia University Libraries collections and services by clicking on the LOCATIONS tab on the top page of the Columbia University Libraries website. You may want to explore the websites of individual Columbia libraries for descriptions of distinctive collections, subject and research guides, and other valuable information and resources readily available online. Columbia University libraries, centers, divisions, and e-resources you may find of special value include the Digital Social Science Center (DSSC), in the Lehman Social Science Library, with links to listings of research resources on Political Science and International Affairs; the Global Studies division, with links to collections and resources for numerous international regions; and the Research Guides by Subject Area page, with links to research guides on many geopolitical- and subject-specific areas of study.

Ask a Librarian a Question – To explore a variety of kinds of research support: submit an email reference query to librarians onsite; request a research consultation with a Gottesman librarian; review frequently asked questions via the library’s Knowledge Database.

Document Delivery – The means to recommend items for purchase and/or to request from other libraries materials (dissertations, book chapters, journal articles, etc.) not available through the Gottesman or Columbia University Libraries.

Learning at the Library – The Gottesman Libraries’ blog via the Pressible platform, including content in many topical areas contributed by library staff members.